Book Talk by Rahul Bhargava
March 4th, 4:00-5:30 PM
Memorial Library Room 126
Dr. Rahul Bhargava will be discussing his new book Community Data (Oxford University Press), specifically focusing on the role of creative arts in crafting data visualizations that transcend the visual. Through case studies and examples spanning physical data sculptures, community data murals, data sonification performances, and embodied data theatre, this talk explores how we can create more inclusive, engaging, and action-oriented interactions with information through multi-sensory invitations.
Workshop: Embodying Data-Telling Impactful Data Stories
March 5th
Memorial Library Room 224
Dr. Bhargava will also be giving a workshop called “Embodying Data-Telling Impactful Data Stories”, which will introduce attendees to strategies and tactics to tell better stories about data. He describes the workshop thusly, “Through an approach of serious play, we will work in teams to select datasets or testimonies related to human rights violations, censorship, or patterns of repression under authoritarian regimes. We will then embody the data through collective sculptures, choreographed movements, or staged scenes that make visible the human impact behind the numbers. The workshop will guide participants step by step: from dataset selection and framing to the translation of information into movement and form.” We will host a lunch immediately after the workshop, so registration is required.
Please do join us at these events and share with colleagues, students, staff, or community members who may be interested!
About Dr. Bhargava:
Rahul Bhargava is an educator, designer, and artist working on creative data storytelling and computational journalism in support of goals of social justice and community empowerment. He has run over 100 workshops on data literacy, designed arts-based data murals and theatre, built award-winning museum exhibits, co-created AI-powered civic technologies with CSOs, and delivered keynote talks across the globe. Rahul’s first book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People with Information”, is now available from Oxford University Press. He leads the Data Culture Group as an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University.
UW-Madison: Launch Pad for the Civic Body
Speaker: Janice Ross, Professor Emerita (Stanford University)
Thursday, April 9, 11:00-12:15
Margaret H’Doubler Theater in Lathrop Hall
Janice Ross will be speaking on her recent book on two UW alumni who met at Hillel, married, and formed an artistic collaboration that changed both of their disciplines: choreographer Anna Schuman Halprin (Dance, 1942) and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (Horticulture, 1941).
In the months preceding U.S. involvement in World War II, UW Madison became a remarkable crossroads for two young Jewish students whose careers would reshape the fields of Dance and Landscape Architecture. Peering into the past, Stanford Professor Emerita of Performance Studies, Janice Ross, uncovers a unique convergence between creative dance, landscape architecture and environmentalism. She argues that this confluence of new disciplines propelled UW Madison into the de-facto start-up university for the civic body. The study of dance education, horticulture and architectural design would reemerge through the work of those two students, Anna and Lawrence Halprin, with a distinctly UW Madison imprint. The result would be a socially responsive civic body, tempered by first-hand experiences with the injustices of religious bias. This mix fueled Anna’s activist performances and Lawrence’s urban environments to help transform the role of the arts in mid-century American life.
Drawing on new archival research Ross brings together a range of the often-contradictory perspectives of environmentalist and Professor Aldo Leopold, Dance Education teacher Margaret H’Doubler, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, and rabbinic leadership at the campus Hillel. She offers the university as a site of disciplinary invention and, for two emerging artists, a portable homeland for their Jewish identity.
The Quilters: Screening and Discussion with Jenifer McShane
The Marquee Cinema at Union South
@ 4:30 pm – 6:45 pm
Join us for a screening of the short documentary The Quilters (2024) followed by a panel discussion featuring director Jenifer McShane in conversation with Jennifer Bastian, the Thurber Park Artist-in-Residence, and Jesse Vieau, Teen Services Librarian at Madison Public Library and facilitator of the Making Justice program. The conversation will be moderated by Marina Moskowitz, the curator of Parallel Lines.
Free Registration Here
Doors open: 4:30pm
Screening begins: 5pm
Panel discussion: 5:45pm-6:45pm
Sunday, April 19
4:30pm-6:45pm
The Marquee Cinema
Union South, Second Floor
1308 W Dayton St
This event is co-sponsored by the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture, the Bubbler at Madison Public Library, and the Center for Visual Culture and Performance Studies.
